I am a blastocyst. A rapidly, oft-dividing bundle of cells. An emerging raspberry of life. To this point all has gone beautifully. I achieve zygotehood, as one half of the cells separate out to become, well, me. Perhaps the basis of me. The seedling. The other separated half of the zygote--in a fit of necessary, primal, bio-cannibalism--allows itself to be consumed in order to nurture the first. Could this be why so many of us spend our lives searching for completion?

I feel wanted. Am wanted. Planned and desired. I am consciousness.

•••

Decatur, Illinois, Tuesday, November 25th, 1924. Late fall. During the day a balmy 42 degrees but dropping quickly toward a low that night of 18. At 6 pm it’s already cold and pitch black. Hyman Rubinstein, 52, sits behind a glass counter in his shoe store on 835 North Water Street. It’s neat, though crowded with items. Twenty-seven years earlier, Hyman had immigrated from Russia where he’d been conscripted into the Russian military, not a wonderful occupation for a Jew. Another name for the position: cannon fodder. But he survived--in fact, he was chosen to become a member of Prince Nicolas’s personal military guard. After a year-long stop in Sweden, he’d made it to America. Over time, he met his wife Hannah and had two sons, Harry and Meyer. Established this shoe store.

Harry his elder has gone home for supper. Only Hyman is left behind to mind the shop.

At 6:30, the small bell over the door rings as a disheveled man in dirty clothes with wild eyes throws open, then SLAMS the door behind him. Rising from his chair Hyman sees a protrusion in the ratty overcoat where the man’s right hand rests. John Stacey shouts to Mr. Rubinstein to “put his hands up,” but before he can, Stacy fires. A muzzle flash flares out from what is now a hole in the man’s jacket pocket, made by his cheap American Bull Dog .38 caliber, octagonal barreled, 5 shot revolver. Until that moment, fully loaded.

Two off-duty waitresses, Mrs. Dorothy Daniels and Mrs. Mary Baldwin are walking by, and they turn suddenly when they hear the shot. Glancing in through the window, they see Rubinstein “struggling’ with Stacy. They dart across the street to the Elliott Filling Station at the corner of Water Street and Central Avenue and shout to the attendant, J.D. McCool.

McCool, having been held up twice himself, was made a special Officer with the Decatur PD and he was licensed to carry a firearm. He “grabbed up his revolver and… telephoned the police.” Then he bolts toward the shoe store.

According to the Decatur Daliy Review:

“As I ran I could hear the old man yelling for help. When I reached the store the old man was lying on the floor with the bandit astride him. They were not more than four feet from the door and directly in front of it. I pressed the muzzle of my gun to the glass and shouted to the bandit to stick ‘em up.“

Stacy was slow to react, so in a fit of Film Noir dialogue McCool shouted again, “Get ‘em clear up or I will kill you where you are.”

Still astride Rubenstein’s [sic] body, the shooter slowly put his hands up. Just then Attorney Howard Halmick and another man came along.… “They broke the door open for me and I jumped in and grabbed the man by the collar and stuck my gun in his side and held him until the officers arrived."

Simon Burstein happens to walk by as Hyman is loaded into the ambulance and he jumps in and rides to the hospital with him. A still conscious Rubinstein tells Burstein what had happened. “I was sitting in the store waiting for my son to return from supper when the man came in the front door. There was a spring lock on the door and he pushed it shut and it locked. I got up to wait on him and the man said to put up my hands. I told him I had only a little money and that he was welcome to it but before I could raise my hands he shot. He tried to get away but I held him, tried to hold him until the police came.”

As they reach the Decatur and Macon County Hospital, Hyman asks Burstein for paper and pen to make out a will, which, though provided, will never be written. Hyman was now too weak.

State’s Attorney C.F. Evens, alerted to the crime, rushes to the hospital. Hyman survives just long enough to give a statement. Evidently before McCool arrived, Stacy had grabbed Hyman and shot him a second time. At 9:17 Hyman Rubinstein is dead.

Simon Burstein who rode in the ambulance was thought to be a stranger. Until he spoke to the reporter from the Review.

“We were boys together,” said Simon Burstein, when referring to Mr. Rubenstein. “We grew up together in a little village in Poland. When I went to England, he entered the Russian army as did all young men of his age. He served six years and he told me he was a member of the Imperial Body-guard of Czar Nicholas when he ascended the throne. He came to the United States reaching Decatur in 1902."

“He was a good man in every way, industrious, devoted to his family and devout in the faith of his fathers. He attended strictly to his own affairs. I do not believe he ever did a wrongful act to any man. If he had I would have known it, for I have known him all my life and no one has ever spoken a word against him."

At the start of the killer’s trial, the Klan rode into town in a show of support for this white man who had merely killed a Jew. Stacey, had ridden the rails from Louisville, Kentucky and admitted to eating 15 cans of Sterno aka canned heat on the day of the murder. Normally used to heat chaffing dishes, the desperate used them as a source of alcohol. A not uncommon practice by those who craved but had no access to booze during the days of Prohibition. Often the cause of death or of 'erratic behavior'. This time sadly, the latter.

Stacy was hanged just before noon, bizarrely on Valentine's Day 1925, a few months following the commission of his crime and after a supposed jailhouse conversion to Christ. Already a pious man, Hyman Rubinstein always carried a copy of the mourner’s kaddish in his breast pocket, the Jewish prayer recited for the dead, transliterated into Hebrew from the original Aramaic. Stacy’s revolver had put a bullet right through the center of the folded prayer.

Hyman’s younger son Meyer wrapped it in wax paper and carried it in his breast pocket for the rest of his days.

•••

It began as an experience of conception, the joining of egg and sperm. Soon, 23 chromosomes merge with 23 others. But first, in a massive, metaphysical flash, instantaneous bolts of lightning strike in interconnected tendrils radiating outward from the center, exploding out of the void in a nanosecond, all against a field of pure, absolute black.

A droning hum, alive with billions of bits of information. Decodable white noise. The endless playing of a single string of Tony Conrad’s violin. One cell in rotating motion divides to become two, then four, sixteen, two-fifty-six. Am floating in perfect amniotic bliss, enveloped in a glowing warmth of idyllic contentedness. That which I will come to regard as me is launching.

•••

Los Angeles, California, Easter Sunday, April 21, 1957. Around 4 in the afternoon. Gilbert and young wife Joanne arrive at the house of her mother Yetta and father Mickey on Oakmore Road in the Beverwill neighborhood. It was the house Joanne had lived in throughout her adolescence, the one she moved to just before entering the 8th grade. To Joni, as she was then known, and her younger brother Jerry, Oakmore was a palace.

When Joni was 6, the family had moved out from Chicago. Mickey and Yetta, (her eldest grandchild would later call her Nana, a name that stuck) rented a small apartment on First and Flores in L.A. Jerry and Joni shared a room and all four shared one tiny bathroom. Happily, after eight years in that undersized unit they moved to the house on Oakmore. Mickey had established the most successful Kaiser Frazier Dealership in the Western United States. Set on the southeast corner of Manchester and Western, it seemed his ship, following years of financial struggle, had finally come in.

He supervised the building of their new home, begun two years after the end of the war, even accomplishing some of the finish work himself. Each child now had their very own room, sharing only a Jack and Jill bathroom and a small sliding wood panel which, when opened, allowed the two, who forever remained close, to speak to each other. This is the house Joanne would always think of as home, right up until the day she married Gilbert. On their wedding day, they moved into a small apartment of their own--at least until Gil could finish his undergraduate accounting degree at UCLA and begin working in the field. Somehow, this generation missed the years that the baby boomers were subsequently afforded to head out and find themselves. Perhaps they didn’t need to look. Why did we?

Gilbert was conscripted into the Army, and for a year and a half, he finished his mandatory service time in picturesque Texarkana, Texas. While stationed there, Gil became the de facto cantor for the local Temple that served the 30 or so Jewish families in that part of Texas. A high pressure job because of the congregation's practice of an additional religion. Friday night services needed to be completed by seven, in time to get to the high school's football game prior to kickoff.

Once in Texas, Joni, now Joanne, secretaried for the dean of a small local college. Sitting behind the admissions desk, she would sneak college catalogues, below the Dean's sight, to prospective black students who were applying for the first time in history to Texarkana College. This following the Warren Court’s mandatory desegregation order. So angry was the College's administration when they caught wind of her actions, they bestowed upon her the epithet, "that damn yankee!"

Gil almost didn’t make it to Texas. Stationed in Fort Ord, CA for boot camp, he was driving back to L.A. one weekend to attend a friend’s wedding when he rolled the Kaiser his father-in-law had given him. Skidding on the rain-slicked highway, the Kaiser tumbled down an embankment, almost ending his life and brief marriage. Marrying Joanne had literally saved his life, thanks to the gift of a car with the very first curved, pop-out windshield. As the car rolled over and over, his head slammed into the glass which ejected rather than decapitating him.

Now, they were back on Oakmore in L.A., on the seventh day of Passover and Easter Sunday, for a day of celebration having little to do with the holidays. Joanne, following an early miscarriage, was pregnant again. Just. Though she'd spilled the beans to her mother, tonight at dinner she would finally be able to tell her beloved ‘Papa’. This would be his first grandchild. There was a palpable excitement in the air. Joanne was all of 22. These days one might deeply consider whether to let someone her age raise a puppy.

Mickey could use some good news. The auto business had experienced a major downturn. Regulation W, initiated by the Eisenhower Administration after the war, had radically changed the way credit was issued and thus how cars were or more often weren't financed. His business took a major hit. When the news of the regulation was announced, Mickey had to fly back early from the first cruise that he and Yetta had ever taken. The ship docked in Honolulu where they had stayed at the Royal Hawaiian, at the time one of the few hotels on Waikiki Beach. They took home movies of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling around in the surf during the filming of From Here to Eternity from a high cliff. But the situation was dire so he was forced to leave his wife on Oahu and fly home immediately.

Before the change in fortunes, while business was still flush, Mickey had agreed to help out Oscar Voight, the friend of a friend, not much more than an acquaintance to Mickey. Voight had asked him to loan a sizable chunk of change so that Voight could buy a used automotive inventory and open a lot. Mickey took out a personal loan from City National Bank for this man who had no credit, and handed over the cash. It was the kind of person Mickey was. Even though the new economic regulations made success a near impossibility, Voight opened the lot at Pico and La Brea.

That Sunday afternoon, Mickey had driven over to meet him. He hoped that today, he would finally be able to pay back the money, the note now due.

Yetta, a good cook, continued to prepare a Sunday meal of brisket, potatoes and carrots. She checked the kitchen clock. Everything was ready, but Mickey was not back. It wasn't his style to be late, or if he was, to not call. They tried calling him, but there was no answer.

Joanne remembers a creeping sense of dread, accompanied by a feeling of nausea. It’s strange what becomes etched into our memories. She can go right back to that moment, with Harry Belafonte singing the Banana Boat song on the TV, a TV that Mickey, a lover of the latest technologies, had installed high up on the wall in a recessed nook. In a rare design mistake, it was too high to watch without craning one’s neck.

Joanne kept calling. Instinct led her to a phone in a bedroom, as far from her mother in the kitchen as she could get. Finally, an answer. But by an unfamiliar male voice. She immediately felt dizzy and sat down hard on the bed. “I’m calling for my father, Mickey.”

The voice continued pleadingly. “Please stop asking, I can’t tell you anything.” Then they hung up.

Gil and his brother-in-law Jerry, now 18, handsome, smart, funny, jumped into Gil’s car to drive to find Mickey. Jerry knew where he would be. The lot wasn’t far. As they approached, they saw police cars, their colored roof lights lit and spinning.

Jerry burst out of the car and was stopped immediately by a policeman who asked for ID. Gil watched from the driver’s seat. Somehow knowing he didn't need to go inside.

Jerry was escorted into the small office. Oscar Voight knew he wouldn't have the money to repay Mickey, so he drove to Vegas with a small stake, hoping to win big, enough to repay the loan. He lost it all, got roaring drunk and drove back to L.A. Fearing the consequences for Mickey, who'd used his beautiful home on Oakmore as collateral, Voight brought a pistol to the meeting. He shot Mickey and then turned the gun on himself. Jerry stepped into the office. His worst fears horribly realized.

•••

Something's gone wrong. I'm suddenly engulfed by a blinding, neon redness. My entire being feels an intense burning, as if my formerly nurturing environment has turned to battery acid. I struggle. The bliss, vanished. What’s happening??? Am left with a single question, DO I CONTINUE, GO ON? I feel it’s up to me. My choice, my decision alone.

The pain now seems nearly unbearable. I struggle under the tightly tucked blankets. I feel this decision looming--do I continue enduring? Will it will always be like this? Is this what existence is? I decide to fight on. I want to live. But at what cost? Decision made gestation continues and ultimately birth.

I slowly open my eyes. While I'd entered the room in the afternoon light, it was now dark out. I see therapist Barbara Findeisen’s, kind face framed by bobbed grey hair. Tiny and in her early seventies, she sits peacefully next to me, saying nothing. I'm exhausted. She shuts off the video camera and hands me the tape of this birth regression she led me through.

I'd always heard, for as far back as I could remember, of the murder of my Great-Grandfather Hyman Rubinstein and years later of my Grandfather and namesake Mickey Rubinstein. My mother Joanne and Grandmother Yetta, would tear up at the mention of his name. But at 32, I had no conscious awareness of exactly when Mickey's murder took place.

I went straight to a phone. My parents, were out of the country, so I called Yetta, my Grandmother, "Nana, when exactly was it that Mickey died. Did he get to hold me? Was it before I was born?"

A deep audible sigh. Then she responds, sadness in her voice. "It was Easter Sunday, the last day of Passover. April 21, 1957." It seemed exactly to match my experience only moments before. Was it possible that I had actually accessed this most distant possible memory? Or instead, certainly more likely, I had known at some point and recreated the experience to match this hidden memory.

It didn't really matter to me. It was enough to have the knowledge that my poor mother had experienced, so early on in my development, the most intense period of grief of her entire life. From the moment she'd heard the news, my life support system began coursing with cortisol and a cocktail of grief neuro-chemicals. She remembers clearly being concerned about the potential affects.

As for myself, I began to wonder, could this have been a factor in a lifetime spent battling clinical depression? How different would my life and the lives of my family have been if the Grandfathers had never crossed paths with the likes of John Stacey and Oscar Voight?

•••

Later the L.A. Coroner's Office would find the folded kaddish that Mickey--born Meyer, the 18 year-old son of the murdered Hyman Rubinstein--had carried in his breast pocket ever since the murder of his own father when he, like his own son this day, was 18. As if in some fucked up cosmic joke, Hyman was 52 when he was shot--the same age as was his son Mickey when he was murdered 34 years later. And that folded Jewish prayer, the one that is recited for the dead, was now pierced through by a second bullet hole, this time from the pistol of Oscar Voight.

So began a journey to find out whatever I could about the perinatal experience. Which would lead me ultimately to journey with Dr. John Lilly to the Soviet Union in 1987, where we would meet Igor Charkovsky, the highly controversial father of underwater birth.

•••

But I’d certainly never gone back this far. So whether it was possible to access these memories, something I struggle to believe is possible, or whether I created a story out of whole cloth, that seemed to fit my life perfectly, I didn't really care.

Many studies have since been done examining the affects on the developing child of trauma in pregnant woman. It makes intuitive sense to me that this tiny being who’s life support system is flooded by cortisol and god knows how many neuro-chemicals, is likely affected on some level. Is it possible that this in utero experience threw off for a lifetime the balance of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine in my poor brain?

Whatever the case, thus began an intense personal interest in all things pre and para-natal which culminated in 1987 a trip to Moscow with Dr. John C. Lilly to meet the highly controversial Soviet, Igor Charkovsky, the developer of long term immersion underwater birth.

This session with Barbara had two profound impacts on my life. It had given me me a sense of wholeness that seemed to explain much or at least gave me the feeling that the depression and self-loathing were not coming from a place of weakness, the fear so many of us suffer daily. it just seemed to fit.

But also, it set me off on a on a lifelong search, stemming from an intense curiousity to know more about the parina to discover more about the parinatel experince.

•••

Decatur, Illinois, Tuesday, November 25th, 1924. Late fall. During the day a balmy 42 degrees but dropping quickly toward a low that night of 18. At 6 pm it’s already pitch black outside. Hyman Rubinstein, 52, sits behind a glass counter in his shoe store on 835 North Water Street. It’s neat though crowded with items, Twenty-seven years earlier Hyman had immigrated from Russia where he’d been a member of the Russian military guard. Not a wonderful occupation for a Jew. Another name for the position: cannon fodder. But he survived. Made it to America. In short order, he met his wife Hannah and had two sons, Harry and Meyer. Established this shoe store.

Harry, his elder has gone home for supper. Only Hyman remains at the shop.

At 6:30 the bell over the door rings as a radically disheveled man in dirty clothes with wild eyes, throws open then shuts the door behind him. Getting up to serve him Hyman sees a protrusion in the ratty overcoat where the man’s right hand rests. John Stacey shouts to Mr. Rubenstein to “put his hands up,” but before he can, Stacy fires. A muzzle flash flares / bursts out from what is now a hole in the man’s jacket pocket made by his cheap American bull dog .38 caliber revolver.

Two off duty waitresses, Mrs. Dorothy Daniels and Mrs. Mary Baldwin are walking by the shop and turn suddenly when they hear the shot. Glancing in through the window they see Mr. Rubinstein “struggling’ with Stacy. They dart across the street to the Elliott Filling Station at the corner of Water Street and Central Avenue and shout to the attendant, that a man had been shot and was being robbed. J.D. McCool had been made a special Officer with the Decatur PD having been held up twice himself, and was thus licensed to own a firearm. He “grabbed up his revolver and then telephoned the police” He then bolts toward the store front.

“As I ran I could hear the old man yelling for help. When I reached the store the old man was lying on the floor with the bandit astride him. They were not more than four feet from the door and directly in front of it. I pressed the muzzle of my gun to the glass and shouted to the bandit to stick ‘em up.“ Stacy was slow to react so in a fit of Film Noir dialogue McCool shouted again, “Get ‘em clear up or I will kill you where you are.” Gangster movie stuff. Tragically not.

According to the Decatur Daily Review:

Still astride Rubenstein’s [sic] body, the shooter slowly put his hands up. Just then Attorney Howard Halmick and another man came along.… “They broke the door open. for me and I jumped in and grabbed the man by the collar and stuck my gun in his side and held him until the officers arrived.

Simon Burstein was walking by as Hyman was being loaded into the ambulance and he jumped in and rode with him to the hospital. A still conscious Mr. Rubenstein told Mr. Burstein about the shooting. “I was sitting in the store waiting for my son to return from supper when the man came in the front door. There was a spring lock on the door and he pushed it shut and it locked. I got up to wait on him and the man said to put up my hands. I told him I had only a little money and that he was welcome to it but before I could raise my hands he shot. He tried to get away but I held him, tried to hold him until the police came.

As soon as they reached the Decatur and Macon County Hospital, Hyman asks Burstein for a paper and pen to write a will, which though provided, will not be written. Hyman was now too weak.

State’s Attorney C.F. Evens had been alerted to the crime and rushed to the hospital. Hyman survives just long enough to give a statement. Evidently before McCool arrived, Stacy had grabbed Hyman and shot him a second time. At 9:17PM, Mr. Hyman Rubinstein is declared dead.

Simon Burstein who rode in the ambulance was thought to be a stranger. That is until he spoke to the reporter from the Decatur Daily review.

“We were boys together,” said Simon Burstein, when referring to Mr. Rubenstein. “We grew up together in a little village in Poland. When I went to England, he entered the Russian army as did all young men of his age. He served six years and he told me he was a member of the imperial body-guard of Czar Nicholas when he ascended the throne. He came to the United States reaching Decatur in 1902.

“He was a good man in every way, industrious, devoted to his family and devout in the faith of his fathers. He attended strictly to his own affairs. I do not believe he ever did a wrongful act to any man. If he had I would have known it, for I have known him all my life and no one has ever spoken a word against him.

At the killer’s trial, during which the Klu Klux Klan rode into town in a show of support for this white man who had merely killed a jew, Stacey, who rode the rails from Louisville, Kentucky admitted to eating 15 cans of Sterno aka canned heat the day of the murder. Using these chaffing dish heaters as a source of alcohol. It was a not uncommon practice by those who rode the rails and craved but had no access to booze during the days of Prohibition. It was often the cause of death, or of so-called erratic behavior. This was the latter.

Stacy was hanged just before noon on February 14, bizarrely Valentines Day, 1925, only a few months after his commission of the crime and following his jailhouse conversion to Christ. Already a pious man, Hyman carried a copy of the mourner’s kaddish in his breast pocket, the jewish prayer recited for the dead transliterated to Hebrew from the original Aramaic. Stacy’s revolver put a bullet through the center of the folded up prayer. Wrapping it in wax paper, Hyman’s son, Meyer, would carry it with him, in his breast pocket for the rest of his days.

•••

Mickey had helped an acquaintance. Took out a loan out from City National Bank so the fellow could buy inventory and open a used car lot. Mickey had owned the most successful Studebaker Hall car lot on the West Coast until new post war economic regulations imposed by Eisenhower made it nearly impossible to succeed. Instead he opens a used car lot on Pico and La Brea. Mickey hoped today, some of the loan would be paid back.

Yetta continued to prepare a delicious Sunday meal of brisket with potatoes and carrots, one, that I would get to eat often, over my lifetime. She was a good cook. She checked her watch. Everything was ready, but Mickey was not yet back. It was not his style to be late, or if he was to be, to not call. They tried calling him, at the lot but there was no answer.

My mother remembers a creeping feeling of dread, accompanied by nausea. It’s strange what gets etched into our memories. She can go right back to hearing Harry Belafonte singing the Banana Boat song on the tv that Mickey, a lover of all the latest technologies, had installed high up on the wall in a recessed nook. In a rare building mistake, it was too high to watch without craning one’s neck.

Still no word. My father and my Uncle Jerry, 18, handsome, decided to drive to find Mickey. Jerry knew where he had gone, to the other guys lot. They take my father’s car.

My mother tried calling the number she had him. By instinct she used a phone in a bedroom, as far from her mother still in the kitchen as she could get. Someone answered. An unfamiliar voice. She felt dizzy instantaneously and sat down hard on the bed. “I’m calling for my father, Mickey.” The voice responded, “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything.” “But my dad, just tell me he’s okay, please tell me that nothing has happened.” The voice continued pleadingly, “Please stop asking, I can’t tell you anything.” He hung up.

Jerry ran out of my father’s car and was stopped by a policeman who asked him for his ID. My father watched from the driver’s seat. Knowing. He never went in. Jerry was escorted in to the small office to identify his father’s body. My grandfather’s friend, knowing he didn’t have the money to make the payment on the bank loan Mickey had taken out, had driven to Vegas with a small stake hoping to win enough to repay the loan. Instead he lost it all. He got roaring drunk and drove back into town to speak with Mickey. Fearing the consequences of of telling Mickey who had used his home as collateral would have, he brought a pistol to the meeting. He shot Mickey and then turned the gun on himself. Jerry stepped into the office. His worst fears horribly realized.

Later they would find, the folded kaddish that Mickey had carried on him in his breast pocket ever since the murder of his own father when he, like his own son this day was 18. As if in some fucked up cosmic joke, Hyman was 52 when he was shot. The same age as was Mickey when he was. And that folded jewish prayer, the one that is recited for the dead, was now pierced by a second bullet hole.